Misleading Trailers for Indie Movies by Leyla Ertürk

Misleading Trailers for Indie Movies

Submitted to: Eser Borak AD 409: BUSINESS ETHICS

Submitted by: Leyla Ert羹rk Zekeriya Ayd覺n

Introduction Misleading marketing practices can be encountered in many different forms and in many different industries. However, one of the prominent examples of deceptive marketing can be seen in film industry because the main nature of this industry holds on to effective visualisation, beautification of the reality and in the end creating an illusion. These qualities can be easily converted into a misleading practice in case of a competitive environment. Considering the size of the film industry, amount of potential consumers and endlessly released productions, this industry is considered as highly competitive. However, when we look at the general environment of today’s film industry, we see that it’s facing some difficulties. Firstly, the excessive amount in produced films doesn’t go along with the number of audiences because the movie goers are mainly fixed, even decreasing considering the internet downloads. Secondly, film production costs are really high and this creates huge budget deficits. So to stay in the industry, production companies are spending huge amounts on marketing and distribution fees in order to create recognition in audiences, reach maximum consumers and become a blockbuster. To realize these objectives, creating more intriguing images, sounds, visual effects or using outstanding casts in films becomes an obligation. This competitive environment doesn’t affect Hollywood studio films much, because they have cutting-edge technology and they are able to spend a lot of money on marketing and distribution. Also they are targeting mainstream consumers. However, independent productions with limited budgets get injured from this environment wildly, because their experimental, artier approach is not demanded like a Hollywood production and they even can’t get screened in many movie theatres. Mainly they are sent to international film festivals and after winning awards, they are recognized and distributed widely. Therefore, the survival of independent movies are quite hard in this competitive environment. For that reason, distributors of independent films use some marketing strategies in order to bring artier movies to the marketplace. These strategies are designed to attract audiences by using deceptive contexts in trailers Therefore, we chose misleading trailers for indie 1

movies as our ethical issue and through out this paper we’re going to analyze ethical concerns related with this concept from different perspectives. However, before we go into detailed analysis, we should state what do we mean by indie movies.

Brief “Indie Film” Movement The indie film movement comes up to fill the counter position of mainstream, blockbuster films. What is aimed with indie movies is to express yourself artistically, challenge the status quo and eliminate restrictions, suppressions, cencorships. “Indie films have gained much respectability in 1990s. In these years, mainstream Hollywood product dominates both domestic and foreign charts, but it is independent movies that are creating waves and winning awards at major festivals around the world.” 1 (Levy, 1999) “By the early 2000s, Hollywood was producing three different classes of films: 1) Big budget blockbusters 2) Art films, specialty films and niche-market films produced by the conglomerate-owned indies 3) Genre and specialty films coming from true indie studios and producers. Budgets on the major studios’ pictures averaged $100 million, with approximately one-third of it spent on marketing because of the large release campaigns. Art film budgets on averaged $40 million per release in the early 2000s, with $10 million to $15 million spent on marketing. The third category comprised over half the features released in the United States and usually cost between $5 and $10 million to produce.”2 (McDonald and Wasco, 2008) Until this point, we gave general information on film industry and categorization of indie movies. From now on, we are stating our ethical question and starting to detail our ethical case by examples and different philosophical approaches.

Ethical Question Is it justifiable to use deceptive trailers for indie movies to attract more people, even if it aims to improve the non-conventional cinema art?

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Levy, E. (1999) Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. [Online] New York University Press. McDonald, P. and Wasco, J. (2008) The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing. P.30-31

Distributors’ Strategies for Independent Films Marketing strategies applied for indie movies are quite important in this case, because the examples of misleading trailers consist of these practices to attract mainstream audience. Distributors use two basic strategies to bring artier films into the marketplace. “The first aspect is to force indie movies inside trojan horse marketing campaigns. By using this method, distributors make indie movies look bigger than their actual size like a Hollywood production.”3 (Kaufman, 2011) By this way, distributors increase the expectations of mainstream audience and they make promises which will not be actualized because of its deceptive background. The second aspect is that playing up films’ genre elements to seduce wider audience. Horror, thrillers, action, comedy or romance are popular genres within mainstream audience. So by putting some of these genre elements into the indie movie trailers appeals to the wide range consumers. As we see, these deceptive marketing techniques are used to create attention on independent films. During an interview on independent film marketing, Zack Coffman says: “The indie world is all about shoestrings! We’re firm believers that in order for an indie to survive you have to work within very focused niches. Every impression, every click has to be maximized and grab hold of the viewer’s attention.” 4 Actually Coffman justifies this marketing practices because it is the only way to survive.

Examples of Misleading Trailers Our ethical issue doesn’t have a timeline of events, so we’re going to give examples to make the ethical concept clear. For this purpose, we picked 4 independent films.

Kaufman, A. (2011) The Delicate Art of Wrapping Indie Movies in Mainstream Marketing. [Online] Available from: http://www.indiewire.com/article/marketing-indies-to-a-mainstream-audience#. [Accessed: 2nd June 2013] 4

Reed, F. (2012) SEO, Digital Marketing and the World of Indie Films. [Online] Available from: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/06/seo-for-independent-films.html. [Accessed: 2nd June 2013]

Drive(2011) This film is advertised like a Hollywood genre film. The trailer emphasizes the movie's action sequences, highlighting brief violent sequences over its more lyrical passages and cinematic longueurs. Because of its misleading trailer, Sarah Deming filed a lawsuit against the 'Drive' distributor and her claim was that it promoted the drama "as a chase, race, or high speed action driving film, similar to 'The Fast and Furious‘ ”. Martha Marcy May Marlene(2011) The trailer of the film emphasizes the film's genre elements, using suspenseful music, horror-film shock-cuts, and high-stakes drama in the film's trailer, despite the movie's more delicate art-house pacing.5 Actual story of the film is about a young woman who escapes from a cult because of sexual violence and positioning women as materials, so she goes to her sister’s so called normal life. This film has great camera works and a deep story line. The film’s executive producer, Ted Hope accepts the misleading context of the trailer. However, he advocates that if the film is of quality, the audience who gets there and has a good experience forgets how they got there in the first place.

The Tree of Life(2011) Terrence Malick’s film trailer looks like a coming of age film starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. The movie will follow the eldest son as he matures to be a conflicted man as a consequence of having a tough-loving father. However, about 50 percent of the movie features scenes of the formation of the universe, the birth of the planet and the dinosaur era. There is little story and less dialogue, because director and writer, Terrence Malick attempts to answer some philosophical questions in the process. Lost in Translation(2003) Sofia Coppola’s film trailer looks like a comedy starring Bill Murray as an actor in a foreign country that finds an unlikely companionship in a young lady. However, the actual film deals with some very serious themes of loneliness, cultural differences and insomnia.

Ethical Issues We picked 3 major ethical issues considering unethical practices in the case. The most crucial point here is that ignoring the basic right of an individual. •

Deceiving people about the content of the films.

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Intervening in people’s freedom of choice.

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Using aggressive marketing techniques to increase the number of audience.

Evaluation of the Concept from Different Perspectives Economically Indie film distributors are seeking to increase the number of audiences to get more sales and profit. To realize this objective, they are using misleading marketing practices to attract the mainstream consumers. Here we should question that do misleading trailers affect the overall demand and sales of the indie movies? “The strategy worked for the first few weeks, but as "Martha" expanded from 98 to 183 screens after four weeks in release, the resulting per-theater-average $2,678 may be an indication of the limits of the film to cross over to the mainstream.”6 Besides people have to pay for a film which will not be preferred under normal circumstances. Legally Inconsistency between movies and their trailers is not legally wrong, so there is not a law sanction for this kind of deception. However, some conscious people who have suffered for this issue filed a lawsuit against the distributors like in the “Drive” case. Morally Morality is a constructed term which differentiates intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are "good" (or right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong). In misleading trailers case, there is an absolute violation of freedom of choice and people’s trust is abused on marketing practices, so by looking at these results, we may say that misleading trailers for indie movies are morally wrong.

Philosophical Approaches UTILITARIANISM Teleological approach which deals with the final causality holds that an act is morally right or acceptable if it produces desirable results. Also the moral worth of a behaviour can only be assessed by looking its consequences. The most prominent example of this approach is utilitarianism. There are four distinctive principles of utilitarianism. According to the consequentialism the rightness of an action is determined solely by looking at the consequences. Misleading trailers for indie movies make mainstream audience watch these movies unintentionally. The Hedonism principle argues that there should be only pleasure and absence of pain. Do all people satisfied with the situation and do not they complain about it? In misleading trailers case watching an indie movie may constitute both pleasure and pain. The maximalism principle holds that a right action may not have some good consequences. All the alternatives should be taken into consideration to choose the best one so the question is that are the misleading trailers best way to make people watch more indie films? Finally, universalism principle argues that the consequences have to be considered for everyone, not just for certain people. Does the majority of the society benefit from the news that exposes the misleading trailers? Utilitarianism has two forms: act and rule utilitarianism. According to the act utilitarianism, the act should produce the greatest balance of pleasure over pain for everyone. If a misleading trailer makes people watch an art piece rather than a mainstream film and creates pleasure rather than pain, the greatest pleasure will be applied. For the rule utilitarianism the action should conform to a set of rules that leads to the greatest good. In the end, maybe we can assign monetary values to movie makers gains since we can calculate it from the sales of tickets but we cannot assign monetary values to the pain or dissatisfaction of the audiences. Thus, making cost-benefit analysis is impossible for the situation.

DEONTOLOGY When determining the right action, different from the teleological approach, deontological approach places a special emphasis on the relationship between duty and the morality of human actions rather than its consequences. So when we consider the nature of the action rather than the benefit of it to the parties, there are questions to be raised. First of all, what are the motives behind misleading trailers? Do they have good or bad intentions, in other words do they do only for their interest? Another important point to be considered is that what if a misleading trailer makes you watch an art piece rather than a mainstream film and the audience benefited from it. In that case is it justifiable? One of the most known examples of deontological ethics is Kantian. According to the Kantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s categorical imperative, the universalizability rule holds that the personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reason for acting must be the reasons that everyone could act on at least in principle. So if all the film producers use the same strategy of misleading trailer, would the result be good? How people decide to watch films without having a reliable information before watching them? Another important point in Kantian ethics is that people should not be treated as means but they should be treated as an end. Is it justifiable that people are used as a mean to have a profit because of the ignorance of their preferences? Or they are used as an end because all these movies are made for the sake of them to watch. VIRTUE ETHICHS Virtue ethics emphasizes the role of one's character and the virtues. Virtue ethics usually contrasts to deontology because it deals with the rightness or wrongness of an action. However, virtue ethics considers what kind of person should we be. It focuses on what people should do or how they should act. In our case, we can question the characteristic of the people responsible from the marketing of the films and we can define some personal traits like honesty and shaming. What should be the characteristics of people who are responsible for the marketing of the films? Do these people have dishonest personalities or do they feel ashamed of their actions? 8

JUSTICE Justice or fairness can be described as giving people what they deserve. However, how will we determine the distributional criteria or principles? As we know Aristotle distinguishes the justice into three. Distributive justice is about the distribution of the societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s benefits and burdens fairly. The question is that are the results of an unjust action equally distributed to the responsible parties? Compensatory justice requires restoring to a person what the person lost when he or she was wronged by someone. Is it possible to compensate the loss of audiences? If it is so, how should the affected audiences be compensated? The retributive justice is the fairness when blaming or punishing persons for wrongdoings and it is the most important and appropriate category of justice for our case. We have also developed an alternative solution taking into consideration the retributive justice. The question raised in here: What is the applicable punishment for the responsible parties?

Possible Solutions Alternative 1: Our first solution is to analyse the situation in terms of retributive justice which is about blaming or punishing persons for wrongdoings. Thus, we suggest that misleading marketing practices should be punished and there should be specific laws to protect audiences. However, the most crucial thing is to set a regulatory system which will match the actual and expected data in any possible marketable products.

Alternative 2: Our last solution is on the level of individual consciousness. Audiences should not select movies only by looking at the trailers. They also should read reviews from the internet sources. They should also be wiser and they shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust anything marketable. 9